Is the World a Better Place Because You Were Born?

Is the World a Better Place Because You Were Born?

by Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance

I was asked to speak about the state of the planet, and to do it in under five minutes. I can do it in three.

The world is being murdered, flayed alive, poisoned, gutted, dismembered.

Every biological indicator is going the wrong direction.

And it’s getting worse by the day.

Two hundred species were driven extinct today, and they were my brothers and sisters. Two hundred will go extinct tomorrow. And the day after.

There are stolid scientists who are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish in less than 35 years.

Imagine that: the murder of the oceans on this water planet.

The problems are not new. This culture has been killing the planet for 6000 to 10000 years. When we think of Iraq, is the first thing we think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reached the ground? That’s how it was, prior to this culture. The first written myth of this culture is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city. The Arabian peninsula was heavily forested. The forests of North Africa were cut to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies. Greece was heavily forested.

Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

And not every culture has destroyed their landbases. The Chumash lived here for at least 13000 years, and when the Europeans arrived here, the place was an ecological paradise. Likewise where I live the Tolowa lived there for at least 12500 years, and likewise when the Europeans arrived the place was a paradise. No longer.

A dear doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward proper treatment is diagnosis. If we refuse to diagnose the problems our actions will never resolve them.

The problems are not soluble by tweaking processes. The problems are inherent in how we perceive the world, how we interact with the world, what we value, and they are functional and inherent to this culture’s economy. What is GNP? It’s a measure of how quickly the living planet is turned into dead products. Trees into two-by-fours, living rivers into kilowatts, schools of fish into fish sticks.

This is not cognitively challenging. We would all understand this if we weren’t from early childhood inculcated into believing that the economy is more important than life, if we weren’t taught that what humans create has meaning and what the world creates does not, that humans have sentience and meaningful lives, and nonhumans and natural communities do not.

But what if this is all wrong? What if life is not a game of monopoly or risk where the point is to run the board, but rather life is a symphony, where the point is to learn your proper role, and play it at the proper time? The point is not for violin players to kill the oboe players and convert them into cash, but rather to make beautiful music together.

The only measure by which we will be judged by those humans and nonhumans who come after ­presuming any remain­ will be the health of the earth. They’re going to care about whether the earth can support life.

At this point in the murder of the planet, there is I think really only one question worth asking: is the world a better place because you were born, and because of your life and because of what you do? That is very possible to do. Think about it: how did the world get to be so glorious and beautiful and fecund in the first place? By everyone living and dying. Salmon make forests better places by living and dying. So do redwood trees and lampreys and banana slugs. That’s how life works. So, the question that the world needs for us to live is: especially given that this culture is killing the planet, how do we individually and collectively make the world a better place by our lives and deaths. By our actions. The planet, not the culture. And that is as true for any organization or corporation as it is for any of us individually. How do we make the real, physical still fecund world that is our only home, better, for hammerhead sharks, for coho salmon, for giant anteaters, for Mekong catfish, Amani flatwings, cayman islands ghost orchids, and orangutans, and the larger communities they call home.

Watch Derrick Jensen reading this essay:

Survival International Calls on UN to Condemn Shoot on Sight Conservation

Featured image: Dozens of people have been shot on sight by park guards in Kaziranga, including severely disabled tribal man Gaonbura Killing. © BBC

     by Survival International

Survival International has called on the UN expert on extrajudicial executions to condemn shoot on sight conservation policies.

In a letter to the Special Rapporteur charged with the issue, Survival stated that “shoot on sight policies directly affect tribal people who live in or adjacent to ‘protected areas’… particularly when park guards so often fail to distinguish subsistence hunters from commercial poachers.”

The letter adds that “nobody knows when wildlife officers are permitted to use lethal force against [suspected poachers], and it is impossible for dependents to hold to account officers whom they believe to have killed without good reason. Many countries have gone further, and granted wildlife officers immunity from prosecution.”

The letter cites Kaziranga National Park in India as an especially striking example of the tactic. According to a recent BBC report, an estimated 106 people have been extrajudicially executed there in the last 20 years, including one disabled tribal man who had wandered over the park boundary to retrieve cattle.

Kaziranga guards have effective legal immunity from prosecution, and have admitted that they are instructed to shoot poaching suspects on sight. This has had serious consequences for tribal peoples living around the park. In June 2016, a seven-year-old tribal boy was shot and maimed for life by guards.

Akash Orang is comforted by his mother after being shot by a park guard. He is now severely disabled.

Akash Orang is comforted by his mother after being shot by a park guard. He is now severely disabled. © BBC

Similar policies are used in other parts of the world, notably Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana, among other African countries.

Speaking about his own anti-poaching work in Africa, poaching expert Rory Young from the organization Chengeta said: ”Shoot on sight is stupid. If we had been shooting on sight during this latest sting operation we would have shot a handful of poachers and that would have been the end of it. Every single poacher is an opportunity for information to get more poachers and work your way up the chain to the ringleaders.”

Survival has asked the Special Rapporteur to clarify that shoot on sight violates fundamental rights enshrined in the UN’s Civil and Political Rights Covenant and other international conventions. It also urges the UN to enquire about the policy with the Indian government, and the government of Assam state, where Kaziranga is located.

Shoot on sight is justified on the grounds that it helps to deter poachers. However, there have been several recent cases of guards and officials at Kaziranga being arrested for involvement in the illegal wildlife trade themselves.

Survival International is leading the fight against these abuses, and calling for a new conservation model that respects tribal peoples. Targeting tribal people diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminals conspiring with corrupt officials. Targeting tribal people harms conservation.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “If any other industry was guilty of this level of human rights abuses, there would be an international outcry. Why the silence when conservationists are involved? Torture and extrajudical killing is never justified – the law is clear on this. Some people think that the death of innocents is justified, that ‘collateral damage’ is necessary in the fight against poaching. We ask them, where is your humanity? Of course, there’s a racist element at play here: Shoot on sight policies would be unthinkable in North America or Europe.”

Prostitution Legislation Must Include Women in the Porn Industry

Prostitution Legislation Must Include Women in the Porn Industry

Featured image: From left to right: Cherie Jiminez, Per-Anders Sunesson, Gail Dines, Julie Bindel, Clara Berglund. By Gail Dines/Facebook)

     by Susan Cox / Feminist Current

I remember when I was first struck by the question: If prostitution is against the law in the US, why isn’t porn?

A friend of mine was telling me about an undercover sting operation at the massage parlour down the street from her apartment in New York, wherein police arrested some of the Asian women who “worked” there. This story made me wonder what kind of men would go to a “massage parlour” and exploit a woman’s desperation and marginalization as an immigrant in the US. Just the men should be thrown in jail for doing that, not those women, I thought.

I recalled the disgustingly racist way I have seen so many white men fetishize Asian women, imagining them to be extra-submissive. I thought about how there were probably hundreds of thousands of porn films promoting this view online, featuring Asian women “servicing” white men — many of which were probably even set in a massage parlour. Then it hit me: Why was it illegal at the place down the street from my friend’s apartment, but when the same thing is done with a camera, it’s considered totally legitimate?

It’s been years since this incongruity occurred to me, but I still don’t have an answer to that question… Because there isn’t one.

Last week, a panel held during the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York addressed this bizarre disconnect between pornography and prostitution in law, activism, and consciousness. Moderated by Clara Berglund, Secretary General of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, the panel featured pornography expert Gail Dines, writer Julie Bindel, prostitution survivor and abolitionist Cherie Jimenez, and Sweden’s Ambassador at Large for Combatting Trafficking in Persons, Per-Anders Sunesson. All panelists advocate for the Nordic Model (a legal model which decriminalizes those who are prostituted and instead targets the demand side of the sex trade, by criminalizing pimps, brothel owners, and johns). The panel was preceded by a screening of Gail Dines’ documentary, Pornland: How the Porn Industry Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.

“When I first saw this documentary, I did not know how bad pornography had gotten,” Jimenez said, referring to the extreme acts of degradation and physical violence (slapping, gagging, choking, prolapsed anuses) that have come to dominate online porn. As a survivor of prostitution who now does frontline work with women trying to exit the sex trade, Jimenez has noticed a parallel between the increase in the brutality of porn and the increasingly sadistic demands of johns experienced by prostituted women today. “It’s a whole different game now,” she said.

Through her journalistic research in Cambodia, Bindel found that the prostituted women she interviewed shared a similar experience. They told her the demands of johns had gotten much worse since gonzo porn had flooded Cambodia, becoming more accessible to men through smart phones. Men would even play this kind of porn on their phones during the encounter and make prostituted women re-create the brutal acts performed in it.

Pro-”sex work” lobbyists like to frame prostitution as something natural, that has always been present throughout history. However, the disturbing requests and acts prostituted women say are expected of them since the Internet porn revolution show otherwise. The demand for prostitution has changed, suggesting it is no more natural than modern cultural norms like the pressure on women to shave their vulvas bald as per porn standards.

“Do you think men are born johns?” asked Dines. “Do you think they just suddenly wake up one day and decide to go to a trafficked or prostituted woman? No! That takes a socialization process. And what is the biggest socializer of sexuality in the world today? Pornography.”

Dines argues that pornography is the ideological arm of what is essentially one and the same sex trade, facilitating the demand for prostitution by normalizing sexual violence, dehumanizing women, and killing empathy in johns. Nonetheless, a sharp legal distinction is made — while prostitution is illegal in many countries, porn is considered to be an above-ground industry.

Its legitimate status means that the porn industry is in a position to dump massive amounts of money into influencing politicians and legislation. Ironically, it also enables the industry to facilitate illegal actions, such as sex trafficking in minors. Dines explains:

“The porn industry has put a ton of money into fighting a law called 2257. All that law says is that, on a porn set, you have to prove with some form of ID that everyone is 18 or above. The porn industry has been fighting that for years, claiming that it inhibits their free speech.”

Although industry lobbyists claim pornography is simply “free speech,” what happens in porn happens to real women (and girls, apparently). The fact that the act is filmed does not make the prostitution disappear, but effectively ensures the trauma is captured for eternity.

After exiting prostitution, Jimenez says she struggled “for a long time trying to feel whole again.” Dines extended this to the experiences of women in pornography, citing research by Melissa Farley which found that prostituted women who had pornography made of them experienced even higher rates of PTSD.

According to Dines, this is most likely due to the fact that, for women in pornography, there is no way to ever truly exit the sex trade. Their exploitation is frozen in time, allowing millions of johns to re-victimize women endlessly, even after their deaths. “Think of the trauma of never again having any sense of bodily integrity or privacy,” said Dines.

Bindel attended the 2015 LA Porn Awards as a journalist and learned about yet another way the industry makes it impossible for women to truly exit porn. She explained:

“The biggest category in 2015 was ‘Milf.’ And it was because when the women were retiring at the age of 35 or 36, the industry wanted to get more out of them. And someone told me something about this that left my blood cold. When the women are about to drop out of making films, for the most popular women, they make a ‘real doll’ from her. And it’s anatomically correct in every way. So men are ordering these exact replicas of these women and their orifices. They mold from her body, inside and out, which means that whatever happens to her, wherever she goes, there are men literally fucking her replica and writing about it online, etcetera. And that to me is the height of sadism.”

Considering the impact of the industry on women prostituted through porn (never mind on women and girls as a whole), Dines’ delivers an impassioned plea to the anti-trafficking movement:

“Don’t forget pornography and don’t forget the women in the industry…The less we think about it, the more we ignore the women in pornography and say, ‘You don’t count. We’re not even including you in this.’”

In her final comments, Dines called upon governments like Sweden to incorporate pornography into the legislation that already exists: “Now has come the time, after so many years of the Nordic Model, that if you’re going to fine or imprison [men] for sexual exploitation, you have to also do that for the exploitation of women in pornography.”

As the Nordic Model continues to spread across the world, this landmark legislation for women’s rights could also be a huge blow to the multi-billion dollar porn industry. It may be some time before feminists can convince states to craft and implement specific policy that includes pornography within the Nordic Model, but it is imperative we push for it. Anything less would abandon so many women and girls, arbitrarily denying them their humans rights and the justice they deserve.

Yellowstone Buffaloes’ Last Stand

Yellowstone Buffaloes’ Last Stand

Featured image by David Mattson

      by Louisa Willcox / Grizzly Times

Last Tuesday, in the shadow of Yellowstone’s Electric Peak, I watched National Park Service employees herd, prod, shock, immobilize, poke, and corral bison that had only shortly before spent their lives roaming wild. That day, 45 animals were shipped for slaughter and 62 “processed” in preparation for being sent to death next week. So far this winter, almost 1,000 out of a total of roughly 5,500 bison have been sentenced to death by government agents or dispatched by hunters.

The killing of Yellowstone’s buffalo is far from over. The carnage is escalating as winter drags on and buffalo, desperate for food, leave Yellowstone Park for lower elevation grasslands north in Montana’s Gardiner basin.  Hundreds more buffalo could be sent to slaughter by the time spring green-up occurs, when buffalo return to graze in the protected core of the Park. A total of 1,400 or more Yellowstone bison could be killed, not including the animals (possibly hundreds) that otherwise do not survive harsh late-winter conditions.

It is important to note that these are not just any bison, but members of the largest free-ranging bison herd in the country, and the most genetically pure of any left in the world. In most other places buffalo have been interbred with domestic cattle. Perhaps most importantly, Yellowstone has the only herd left that still serves something akin to the ecological role that it played when Europeans first arrived and 30-88 million bison thundered across the plains of what is now the western United States.

How is it that this harassment and torture of bison is happening inside a national park, which is presumably all about preservation?

The extent to which Park Service personnel work to keep their violence towards buffalo out of the public eye is perhaps emblematic of a conflicted conscience and cognizance that something is morally wrong. But a lawsuit brought last year by journalist Christopher Ketcham and Stephany Seay, Communications Director of the Buffalo Field Campaign, (BFC) requires the agency to now show the media what it is doing. I can say that witnessing the Park Service-administered treatment of buffalo is not for the faint of heart.

With the help of poles and electric cattle prods, bison after bison was forced from a small pen into a hydraulic squeeze chute, where it bucked and thrashed and bellowed, in a crazed panic. Each bison was squeezed so hard inside the metal cage that most finally stopped bucking, at which point a metal bar pinned its head up to the side of the chute.  Through the slats in the chute, you could see their tongues hanging out, and their eyes bulging. Their hoarse breathing was audible, even from 20 yards away. Many had blood on their coats as a result of injuries from the horns of other distressed bison—a direct consequence of being stampeded, slammed up against each other, and pushed between pens along a maze of metal-reinforced alleys.  Some of the younger bison literally tore their own horns off against the cages and bars. If there is a hell in the bison world, this must be it.

While pinned in the chute, Park technicians drew blood and checked teeth, weighed them, then released them into holding pens.

A few yearling calves escaped the ordeal because the chute was too big to effectively contain and immobilize them. These were waved through. Still, none of the bison we saw will likely escape slaughter.

The chute’s brand name, “The Silencer,” had been deliberately painted over with an inane reminder of the year, “2016-2017,” perhaps in case we journalists were to attempt substituting photos of atrocities perpetrated during previous years for the atrocities perpetrated while we were there.

From a catwalk above the pens, I could see a group of yearling calves, all with smears of blood on their bodies from rubbing up against one calf whose horn had been torn off. They looked up at me in terror and alarm.  I was helpless to do anything except bear witness.   I felt that these youngsters were owed a profound apology.

In a matter of days, these calves will be gutted, dressed and hung in White’s Meat Processing in Ronan, Montana. According to the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the process entails literally sending animals to a gas chamber, after which they are “stunned, shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut.”

The meat will be distributed to Indian people, which is better than most alternatives, but hardly the point. These wild beings, the product of millions of years of evolution, uniquely adapted to the harsh conditions of Yellowstone, and members of a close-knit herd, will be killed for no reason except to placate tough-minded stockmen and their ideologue allies (read: Trump’s core supporters).

As in the case of grizzly bears and wolves, management of buffalo caters primarily to a minority of well-heeled and politically well-connected agriculture interests at the expense of the broader public, who flock to Yellowstone to see these rare and iconic animals in the flesh. More on this later.

There seems to be no regard for the fact that bison have been on this landscape since the Ice Age, or that they survived the worst that the forces of nature could throw at them – except Europeans and our guns. Their ancestors evolved with giant short-faced bears, sabre tooth cats, dire wolves, woolly mammoths and ice-age camels. All these animals are gone now, but a remnant of bison is still with us.

Yellowstone bison are descendants of just 23 animals that had survived the slaughters of the 1800s. All this begs the question: why are we persecuting these animals again? And why is the Park Service, which helped bring them back from the brink, so intimately involved in their deaths?

 Atrocities in Yellowstone Park

It baffles me that the National Park Service is leading current efforts to capture and send to slaughter buffalo that are simply poised to roam north into the Gardiner Basin – as bighorn sheep, elk, deer, pronghorn, wolves and bears do. This behavior is natural. Even though buffalo are well-equipped with huge heads for shoveling deep snow to uncover grass, roaming downhill to more clement climes is the path of least resistance when snow is deep, or when thick ice prevents bison from reaching the grass below.

With the Park Service’s help, the state of Montana will probably reach its goal of killing 1,400 Yellowstone’s buffalo. Although the Park Service estimates that forage in Yellowstone could support 5,000-7,000 buffalo, an outdated bison management plan uses an antiquated target of 3,000 animals. Further, a 2000 court-mediated settlement agreement of a lawsuit filed by Montana’s Department of Livestock against the Park Service gives the state and its powerful livestock industry inordinate influence over bison management, even it appears, inside a national park.

It was noteworthy that no one from Montana’s livestock industry or State Department of Livestock participated in the tour I was on. Why bother, when Park Service employees seemed more than happy to do their dirty work and field the tough questions from reporters — despite the fact that this work is antithetical to the Park Service’s mission of protecting natural resources.

Having worked as a wildlife advocate for over 30 years in the political pressure cooker that is Greater Yellowstone, I can only imagine the conversations among Park officials. “Maybe our willingness to kill so many will buy good will from the state in the revision of the bison plan.” Or: “our hands are tied, especially under the new Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke,” a former Montana Congressman with strong ties to industry. Or: “if we kill 1,400 bison this year, we might buy a reprieve of several years before a similar out-migration of bison would necessitate significant killing again.”

All humans share the unique ability to rationalize activities that feel inherently wrong. I doubt that many of the Park employees engaged in this debacle had imagined that their job description could include sending to death wildlife that they had been entrusted to protect.

Last year, Yellowstone Park proposed shipping some animals that would have been otherwise killed to a quarantine facility on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana. There is presently only one such facility authorized to take Yellowstone bison, located 30 miles north of Yellowstone near the hamlet of Corwin Springs.  There, USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) kills 50% or so of the captive buffalo that test positive for the disease brucellosis—which is the putative cause for the entire capture, containment, and slaughter program. (More on this later).

Over time, the caged sub-population is “cleansed” of the disease, but there is no chance of returning home. Nor will this — or any other method proposed so far — purge the entire population of the disease.

Needless-to-say, the Park’s proposal to send bison to Fort Peck’s facility is stridently opposed by livestock organizations, but supported by some conservationists and Tribes. Two weeks ago, Republican state legislators killed a bill that would have authorized the shipping of Yellowstone buffalo to Fort Peck. There is no doubt that regressives in the livestock industry have the upper hand, and will not make even modest concessions to those who have more altruistic and public-minded values.

Buffalo Management: The Ruse of Cleansing the Land of Disease

You commonly hear that the killing and expensive quarantine of buffalo is to protect cattle from the disease brucellosis, which is carried by buffalo. (Paradoxically, bison originally contracted the disease from European cows). But this rationale turns out to be bogus. Although buffalo do carry brucellosis and could theoretically transmit the disease to cattle, they have never been known to do so in the wild. In fact, there are only a handful of cattle near where the buffalo migrate in winter – and none of these cows are on public lands.

By contrast, elk, which are 25 times more numerous than buffalo and interact with cattle far more often, have transmitted brucellosis to cows on at least 6 documented occasions, most recently in November, 2015 (link). Yet nothing is being done about the elk “problem”, in part because elk are sportmens’ darlings and generate at least $11 million annually in state hunting revenues in Montana. Something deeper, even pathologic, lies beneath disparities between how bison and elk are treated.

If brucellosis were a real problem, the livestock industry would be advocating more consistent policies and taking the elk disease threat seriously. But such is not the case, which suggests that the hype about brucellosis in bison is really cover for something else.

In fact, what we have is a cabal of stockmen, state veterinarians, legislators, and employees of the Board of Livestock using paranoia over “disease ridden” buffalo to perpetuate political control and an archaic, regressive mindset obsessed with dominating the natural world. These bad actors aim at nothing less than keeping the West under their thumb, perpetuating a regime that was instituted under the banner of Manifest Destiny. This despite the fact that the region’s economic and cultural health depends increasingly upon amenities rooted in wildlife and public lands.

Mary Meagher, longtime bison biologist in Yellowstone Park, put it this way: ”Brucellosis is a smoke screen. The real issue is that ranchers do not want bison out on the land.” (link)

In furtherance of their agenda, the livestock industry has adopted the bizarre and extreme position of tolerating “no risk” of brucellosis in the case of buffalo, no matter what the cost, which is borne mainly by taxpayers—a classic case of subsidies for a coddled special interest. Dare we call them welfare ranchers?

The Park Service’s Cowboy Culture?

In keeping with the narrative of bison as diseased livestock, it was interesting to see that most of the 12 involved Park Service employees (including only one woman) played the part of cowboy in this week’s bison “processing.” They could have passed as cowhands anywhere in the West, with their silk scarves and chaps. Four galloped their horses, all in a row, waving their right arms in unison as if on a movie set, to run bison from a larger holding area into smaller pens. It struck me they may have been watching too many Hollywood westerns.

But this is the National Park Service, not the Department of Livestock. Is it easier to distance yourself from the nasty business of sending wild buffalo to slaughter if done in the persona of a cowboy?  Does the task somehow become more romantic, less brutal?

Only the head of the operation, Brian Helm, who bore the military-style title of “Incident Commander,” seemed to be truly enjoying himself. Of all the techs, Brian was most cowboy in his dress and demeanor. His chaps had fancy leather fringe. He stood on top of the catwalk above “the Silencer” and gestured dramatically with white-gloved hands, signaling to the other techs how much tighter the neck bar needed to be; whether it was time to draw blood, check teeth, or lift the animal to get a weight; what gender the animal was and in which pen they should be herded. He seemed the conductor of an orchestra that played a sort of buffalo requiem.

Every operation has one who seems to relish the job of its commander, even if the work is brutal and cruel. In the course of human history, we have demonstrated time and again, how easy it is for humans to normalize the unthinkable—especially if you include a fancy-dress outfit.

 The Killing Fields: No End In Sight

The current killing program is authorized by the 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan. Although outdated, government agencies are far from revising the plan. Yellowstone Park’s bison biologist Rick Wallen reported that the agencies cannot agree on objectives, let alone a range of alternatives for analysis. A planning process started in 2015 appears, for now, dead in the water. Wallen thinks the plan might take 10 years or so to complete. This means that the Park Service would need to strive in the meantime to maintain the current population target of 3,000 bison and to continue the cycle of killing.

Of all the intractable wildlife debates in Yellowstone, including wolves and grizzlies, perhaps the most stuck and regressive surrounds buffalo. Yes, things may be incrementally improving, as we were told, since the days when bison numbers hovered near zero. But this is the 21st century, and Yellowstone’s buffalo deserve better.

Fortunately, there are a few examples of where buffalo are being better treated when they step outside the Park into Montana’s non-park lands.

Progress at Horse Butte

As of last year, wild bison are being accommodated to the west of the Park on Horse Butte, a peninsula in Hebgen Lake. Bison can now roam on Horse Butte year round, and have their babies in peace.

Here a majority of landowners made it clear to Montana Governor Steve Bullock that they wanted wild bison to be able to roam on their private land. They expressly opposed armed Department of Livestock thugs on horseback trespassing and harassing animals on land they own.  Moreover, there are no cows there after a grazing allotment had been retired.

This is a shining example of what can be done to co-exist with bison elsewhere in Greater Yellowstone. There are a number of residents of the Gardiner and the Taylor Fork area, who also embrace a kinder, gentler approach to managing bison, and would welcome them on their land.


The good folks at the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) need to be credited with much of the hard work reaching out to and helping organize landowners on Horse Butte.

Buffalo Field Campaign: Defending Buffalo 24-7

My friends at BFC (link) have been on the ground fighting for buffalo and documenting the mistreatment of these animals since 1997. BFC Founder and film-maker extraordinaire, Mike Mease, has shot more footage of buffalo in all seasons and conditions, happy and tragic, than anyone alive. Co-founder Dan Brister has written a scholarly book on buffalo. Darrell Geist is a walking encyclopedia of bison management.  

BFC’s strategies and tactics are extraordinary — certainly different than any other environmental organization in the region. First, they work closely with Native Americans who also see buffalo as sacred yet maligned creatures.

Second, they rely heavily on volunteers who are out on the ground every day observing buffalo and the activities of hunters and managers.  Over 5,000 volunteers have cut their teeth in conservation working with BFC.  Numerous of these campaigners have moved on to positions of leadership in other conservation groups.

Third, BFC is one of the few groups that signs on young people, who are critical to shaping the future of wildlife and wildlands conservation, which is rapidly greying. By contrast, most other organizations tend to rely almost exclusively on professional staff. These staff tend to cycle between groups, which perpetuates a kind of “group think.”

Few other groups share BFC’s commitment to documenting what is happening in the field. Over the years, I have seen a sad trend in conservation that increasingly emphasizes a kind of “professionalism” that prioritizes political cleverness and certain in-office technical skills over observation and deep immersion in the natural world.

I honestly cannot imagine how the hardy warriors who volunteer with BFC survive bearing witness to the atrocities perpetrated on buffalo, and counting the dead – over 8,000 since the group was founded.  The BFC community lives communally and frugally in cabins near West Yellowstone and Gardiner, where they keep an eye on the buffalo every day, no matter how bitter the cold. Maybe they do so well because they are a bit like buffalo themselves: tough and stubborn.

On the day of the tour, Stephany Seay, a BFC stalwart, seemed to mirror the turmoil of the buffalo. (Listen to a great interview on Grizzly Times with Stephany here). Uncharacteristically quiet, her weathered face showed pain, grief, outrage.  She had seen so many more buffalo dead, or dispatched to death, than I ever will – or hope to. Even as she snapped photos, part of her seemed to be dying with the buffalo.

Up on the catwalk, above the din of a buffalo heaving herself against the metallic cage, Brian Helm with white gloves flashing, stands as Stephany’s opposite.  As Mike Wright wrote in the Bozeman Chronicle story on the tour, “it was just another day in the Park at the Stephens Creek Capture Facility,” (link) implying that the “processing” of the buffalo had become routine.

But routinizing brutal behavior desensitizes people to the import of their actions. Have those involved in processing bison for the Park Service become inured to the practice of killing? How can the broader public hope for kinder treatment of buffalo if agency personnel see killing as an acceptable solution to “the problem,” as defined by the livestock organizations that do not want “diseased” buffalo to leave the Park?

Copyright 2017 by Louisa Wilcox.  Republished with permission.

 

2.7 Million Animals Killed by Federal Wildlife-destruction Program in 2016

2.7 Million Animals Killed by Federal Wildlife-destruction Program in 2016

     by Center for Biological Diversity

WASHINGTON— The highly secretive arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture known as Wildlife Services killed more than 2.7 million animals during 2016, according to new data from the agency.

The multimillion-dollar federal program targets wolves, cougars, birds and other wild animals for destruction — primarily to benefit the agriculture industry. Of the 2.7 million animals killed last year, nearly 1.6 million were native wildlife species.

According to the latest kill report, the program last year destroyed 415 gray wolves; 76,963 adult coyotes, plus an unknown number of coyote pups in 430 destroyed dens; 407 black bears; 334 mountain lions; 997 bobcats; 535 river otters, including 415 killed “unintentionally”; 3,791 foxes, plus an unknown number of fox pups in 128 dens; and 21,184 beavers.

The program also killed 14,654 prairie dogs outright, as well as an unknown number killed in more than 68,000 burrows that were destroyed or fumigated. These figures almost certainly underestimate the actual number of animals killed, as program insiders have revealed that Wildlife Services kills many more animals than it reports.

“Despite mounting public outcry to reform these barbaric, outdated tactics, Wildlife Services continues its taxpayer-funded slaughter of America’s wildlife,” said Collette Adkins, a biologist and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s simply no scientific basis for continuing to shoot, poison and strangle millions of animals every year. These cruel practices not only fail to effectively manage targeted wildlife but also pose ongoing threats to other animals, including endangered species and pets.”

According to the new data, the wildlife-killing program unintentionally killed 2,790 animals last year, including badgers, bears, bobcats, foxes, muskrats, otters, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, turtles and more. Such data reveals the indiscriminate nature of painful leg-hold traps, strangulation snares, poisons and other methods used by federal agents.

Earlier this month a young, endangered male wolf known as OR-48, died an agonizing death in northeast Oregon after taking the scented bait from a cyanide trap put out by the federal wildlife killers. The program’s brutality has fueled growing public outcry and calls for reform by scientists, elected officials and nongovernmental organizations.

“The Department of Agriculture needs to get out of the wildlife-slaughter business,” said Adkins. “Wolves, bears and other carnivores help keep the natural balance of their ecosystems. Our government kills off the predators, such as coyotes, and then kills off their prey — like prairie dogs — in an absurd, pointless cycle of violence.”

The wildlife-killing program contributed to the decline of gray wolvesMexican wolvesblack-footed ferretsblack-tailed prairie dogs and other imperiled species during the first half of the 1900s and continues to impede their recovery today.